Chocolate Owls in the Old Gum Tree
Chocolate Owls in the Old Gum Tree Edited by Tiffany Hill
David Sedaris
Christopher Publication St. Louis, Missouri
Copyright © 2 013 Tiffany Hill All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without written consent from the publisher. Request for consent or further inquiry should be directed to the address below. First Printing: October 2013 Published in the United States University of Missouri – St. Louis Fine Arts Building 7701 Florissant Road Normandy, Missouri 63121 Printed in the usa
This book is for my niece and nephews, mackenzie, cody, tyler, carson, and conner.
Stories Us and Them 13 •
Laugh, Kookaburra 29 •
Understanding Understanding Owls 51 •
Us and Them
first moved to North Carolina, we lived in a rented house three blocks from the school where I would begin the third grade. My mother made friends with one of the neighbors, but one seemed enough for her. Within a year we would move again, and, as she explained, there wasn’t much point in getting too close to people we would have to say goodbye to. Our next house was less than a mile away, and the short journey would hardly merit tears, or even goodbyes, for when my family
that matter. It was more of a “see you later” situation, but still I adopted my mother’s attitude, as it allowed me to pretend that not making friends was a conscious choice. I could if I wanted to. It just wasn’t the right time. Back in New York State, we had lived in the country, with no sidewalks or street lights; you could leave the house and still be alone. But here, when you looked out the window, you saw other houses, and people inside those houses. I hoped that in walking around after dark I might witness a murder, but for the most part our neighbors just sat in their living rooms, watching t.v. The only place that seemed truly different was owned by a man named, I think, Mr. Tomkey, who did not believe in television. This was told to us by our mother’s friend, who dropped by one after‑ noon with a basket full of okra. The woman did not editorialize — rather, she just presented her information, leaving her listener to make of it what she might. Had my mother said, “That’s the craziest thing I’ve ever heard in my life,” I assume that the friend would have agreed,
and had she said, “Three cheers for Mr. Tomkey,” she likely would have agreed as well. It was a kind of test, as was the okra. To say that you did not believe in television was different from saying that you did not care for it. Belief implied that television had a master plan, and that you were against it. It also suggested that you thought too much. When my mother reported that Mr. Tomkey did not believe in t.v., my father said, “Well, good for him. I don’t know that I believe in it, either.” “That’s exactly how I feel,” my mother said, and then my parents watched the news, and whatever came on after the news. Word spread that Mr. Tomkey did not own a television, and you began hearing that, while this was all very well and good, it was unfair of him to inflict his beliefs upon others, specifically his innocent wife and children. Just as the blind man develops a keener sense of hearing, it was specu‑ lated that the family must somehow compensate for their loss. “Maybe they read,” my mother’s
friend said. “Maybe they listen to the radio, but you can bet your boots they’re doing something.” I wanted to know what this something was, and so I began peering through the Tomkeys’ win‑ dows. During the day, I’d stand across the street from their house, acting as though I were waiting for someone, and at night, when the view was better and I had less chance of being discovered, I would creep into their yard and hide in the bushes beside their fence. Because they had no t.v., the Tomkeys were forced to talk during dinner. They had no idea how puny their lives were, and so they were not shamed that a camera would have found them uninterest‑ ing. They did not know what attractive was, or what dinner was supposed to look like, or even what time people were supposed to eat. Some‑ times they wouldn’t sit down until eight o’clock, long after everyone else had finished doing the dishes. During the meal, Mr. Tomkey would occasionally pound the table and point at his children with a fork, but the moment he finished everyone would start laughing. I got the idea that
he was imitating someone else, and wondered if he spied on us while we were eating. When fall arrived and school began, I saw the Tomkey children marching up the hill with paper sacks in their hands. The son was one grade lower than me, and the daughter was a grade higher. We never spoke, but I’d pass them in the halls from time to time and attempt to view the world through their eyes. What must it be like to be so ignorant and alone? Could a normal person even imagine it? Staring at an Elmer Fudd lunchbox, I tried to divorce myself from everything I already knew: Elmer’s inability to pronounce the letter “R ,” his constant pursuit of an intelligent and considerably more famous rabbit. I tried to think of him as just a drawing, but it was impossible to separate him from his celebrity. One day in class, a boy named William began to write a wrong answer on the blackboard and our teacher flailed her arms, saying, “Warning, Will. Danger, danger.” Her voice was synthetic and void of emotion, and we laughed, knowing she was imitating the robot in a weekly show about
a family who lived in outer space. The Tomkeys, though, would have thought she was having a heart attack. It occurred to me that they needed a guide, someone who could accompany them through the course of an average day and point out all the things they were unable to understand. I could have done it on weekends, but friendship would have taken away their mystery, and inter‑ fered with the good feeling I got from pitying them. So I kept my distance. In early October, the Tomkeys bought a boat, and everyone seemed greatly relieved, especially my mother’s friend, who noted that the motor was definitely secondhand. It was reported that Mr. Tomkey’s father ‑ in ‑ law owned a house on the lake, and had invited the family to use it whenever they liked. This explained why they were gone all weekend, but it did not make their absences any easier to bear. I felt as if my favorite show had been canceled. Halloween fell on a Saturday that year, and by the time my mother took us to the store all the good costumes were gone. My sisters dressed as
witches and I went as a hobo. I’d looked forward to going in disguise to the Tomkeys’ door, but they were off at the lake, and their house was dark. Before leaving, they had left a coffee can full of gumdrops on the front porch, alongside a sign reading, “Don’t be greedy.” In terms of Halloween candy, individual gumdrops were just about as low as you could get. This was evidenced by the large number of them floating in an adjacent dog bowl. It was disgusting to think that this was what a gumdrop might look like in your stomach, and it was insulting to be told not to take too much of something you didn’t really want in the
DON’T
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first place. “Who do these Tomkeys think they are?” my sister Lisa said. The night after Halloween, we were sitting around watching t.v. when the doorbel l rang. Visitors were infrequent at our house, so, while my father stayed behind, my mother, sisters, and I ran downstairs in a group, opening the door to discover the entire Tomkey family on our front stoop. The parents looked as they always had, but the son and daughter were dressed in cos‑ tumes — she as a ballerina and he as some kind of rodent with terry ‑ cloth ears and a tail made from what looked to be an extension cord. It seemed they had spent the previous evening isolated at the lake, and had missed the opportu‑ nity to observe Halloween. “So, well, I guess we’re trick ‑ or ‑ treating now, if that’s o.k.,” Mr. Tomkey said. I attributed their behavior to the fact that they didn’t have a t.v., but tel evision didn’t teach you everything. Asking for candy on Halloween was called trick ‑ or ‑ treating, but asking for candy on November 1st was called begging, and it made
people uncomfortable. This was one of the things you were supposed to learn simply by being alive, and it angered me that the Tomkeys did not understand it. “Why, of course it’s not too late,” my mother said. “Kids, why don’t you … run and get … the candy.” “But the candy is gone,” my sister Gretchen said. “You gave it away last night.” “Not that candy,” my mother said. “The other candy. Why don’t you run and go get it?”
“You mean our candy?” Lisa said. “The candy that we earned?” This was exactly what our mother was talking about, but she didn’t want to say this in front of the Tomkeys. In order to spare their feelings, she wanted them to believe that we always kept a bucket of candy lying around the house, just waiting for someone to knock on the door and ask for it. “Go on, now,” she said. “Hurry up.”
My room was situated right off the foyer, and if the Tomkeys had looked in that direction they could have seen my bed, and the brown paper bag marked “My Candy. Keep Out.” I didn’t want them to know how much I had, and so I went into my room and shut the door behind me. Then I closed the curtains and emptied my bag onto the bed, searching for whatever was the crummiest. All my life, chocolate has made me ill. I don’t know if I’m allergic or what, but even the smallest amount leaves me with a blinding headache. Eventually, I learned to stay away from it, but as a child I refused to be left out. The brownies were always eaten, and when the pounding began I would blame the grape juice or my mother’s cigarette smoke or the tightness of my glasses — anything but the chocolate. My candy bars were poison but they were name brand, and so I put them in pile no. 1, which definitely would not go to the Tomkeys. Out in the hallway I could hear my mother straining for something to talk about. “A boat!” she said. “That sounds marvelous. Can you just drive it right into the water?”
“Actually, we have a trailer,” Mr. Tomkey said. “So what we do is back it into the lake.” “Oh, a trailer. What kind is it?” “Well, it’s a boat trailer,” Mr. Tomkey said. “Right, but is it wooden or, you know … I guess what I’m asking is what style trailer do you have?” Behind my mother’s words were two messages. The first and most obvious was “Yes, I am talking about boat trailers, but also I am dying.” The second, meant only for my sisters and me, was “If you do not immediately step forward with that candy you will never again experience freedom, happiness, or the possibility of my warm embrace.” I knew that it was just a matter of time before she came into my room and started collecting the candy herself, grabbing indiscriminately, with no regard for my rating system. Had I been thinking straight, I would have hidden the most valuable items in my dresser drawer, but instead, panicked by the thought of her hand on my doorknob, I tore off the wrappers and began cramming the candy
bars into my mouth, desperately, like someone in a contest. Most were miniature, which made them easier to accommodate, but still there was only so much room, and it was hard to chew and fit more in at the same time. The headache began immediately, and I chalked it up to tension. My mother told the Tomkeys that she needed to check on something, and then she opened the door and stuck her head inside my room. “What the hell are you doing?” she whispered, but my mouth was too full to answer. “I’ll just be a moment,” she called, and as she closed the door behind her and moved toward my bed I began breaking the wax lips and candy necklaces pulled from pile no. 2. These were the second ‑ best things I had received, and while it hurt to destroy them it would have hurt even more to give them away. I had just started to mutilate a miniature box of Red Hots when my mother pried them from my hands, accidentally finishing the job for me. bb ‑ sized pellets clattered onto the floor, and as I followed them with my eyes she snatched up a roll of Necco wafers.
“Not those,” I pleaded, but, rather than words, my mouth expelled chocolate, chewed chocolate, which fell onto the sleeve of her sweater. “Not those. Not those.” She shook her arm, and the mound of chocolate dropped like a horrible turd onto my bedspread. “You should look at yourself,” she said.
“I mean, really look at yourself.” Along with the Necco wafers she took several Tootsie Pops and a half dozen caramels wrapped in cellophane. I heard her apologize to the Tomkeys for her absence, and then I heard my candy hitting the bottom of their bags. “What do you say?” Mrs. Tomkey asked. And the children answered, “Thank you.” While I was in trouble for not bringing my candy sooner, my sisters were in more trouble for not bringing it at all. We spent the early part of the evening in our rooms, then one by one we eased our way back upstairs, and joined our parents in front of the t.v. I was the l ast to arrive, and took
a seat on the floor beside the sofa. The show was a Western, and even if my head had not been throbbing I doubt I would have had the where‑ withal to follow it. A posse of outlaws crested a rocky hilltop, squinting at a flurry of dust advancing from the horizon, and I thought again of the Tomkeys, and of how alone and out of place they had looked in their dopey costumes. “What was up with that kid’s tail?” I asked. “Sh ‑ h ‑ h,” my family said. For months I had protected and watched over these people, and now, with one stupid act, they had turned my pity into something hard and ugly. The shift wasn’t gradual but immediate, and it provoked an uncomfortable feeling of loss. We hadn’t been friends, the Tomkeys and I, but still I had given them the gift of my curiosity. Wonder‑ ing about the Tomkey family had made me feel generous, but now I would have to shift gears, and find pleasure in hating them. The only alterna‑ tive was to do as my mother had instructed, and take a good look at myself. This was an old trick, designed to turn one’s hatred inward, and while
I was determined not to fall for it, it was hard to shake the mental picture snapped by her sugges‑ tion: Here is a boy sitting on a bed, his mouth smeared with chocolate. He’s a human being, but also he’s a pig, surrounded by trash and gorging himself so that others may be denied. Were this the only image in the world, you’d be forced to give it your full attention, but fortunately there were others. This stagecoach, for instance, coming round the bend with a cargo of gold. This shiny new Mustang convertible. This teen ‑ age girl, her hair a beautiful mane, sipping Pepsi through a straw, one picture after another, on and on until the news, and whatever came on after the news.
Laugh, Kookaburra
Australia twice so far, but according to my father I’ve never actually seen it. He made this observation at the home of my cousin Joan, whom he and I visited just before Christmas last year, and it came on the heels of an equally aggressive comment. “Well,” he said, “David’s a better reader than he is a writer.” This from someone who hasn’t opened a book since “Dave Stockton’s Putt to Win,” in 1996. He’s never been to Australia, either. Never even come close. i ’ ve been to
“No matter,” he told me. “In order to see the country, you have to see the countryside, and you’ve only been to Sydney.” “And Melbourne. And Brisbane,” I said. “And I have too gone into the country.” “Like hell you have.” “All right,” I said. “Let’s get Hugh on the phone. He’ll tell you. He’ll even send you pictures.” Joan and her family live in Binghamton, New York. They don’t see my father and me that often, so it was pretty lousy to sit at their table, he and I bickering like an old married couple. Ashamed by the bad impression we were making, I dropped the countryside business, and as my dad moved on to other people’s shortcomings I thought back to the previous summer, and my twenty ‑ three hour flight from London to Sydney. I was in Australia on business, and because someone else was paying for the ticket, and it would be possible to stop in Japan on the way home, Hugh joined me. This is not to put Australia down, but he’d already gone once before. Then, too, spend that much time on a plane and you’re entitled to
a whole new world when you step off at the other end — the planet Mercury, say, or, at the very least, Mexico City. For an American, though, Australia seems pretty familiar: same wide streets, same office towers. It’s Canada in a thong, or that’s the initial impression. I hate to admit it, but my dad was right about the countryside. Hugh and I didn’t see much of it, but we wouldn’t have seen anything were it not for a woman named Pat, who was born in Melbourne and has lived there for most of her life. We’d met her a few years earlier, in Paris, where she’d come to spend a mid ‑ July vacation. Over drinks in our living room, her face dewed with sweat, she taught us the term “shout,” as in “I’m shout‑ ing lunch.” This means that you’re treating, and that you don’t want any lip about it. “You can also say, ‘It’s my shout,’ or, ‘I’ll shout the next round,’ ” she told us. We kept in touch after her visit, and when my work was done, and I was given a day and a half to spend as I liked, Pat offered herself as a guide. On that first afternoon, she showed us around
Melbourne, and shouted coffee. The following morning, she picked us up at our hotel, and drove us into what she called “the bush.” I expected a wasteland of dust and human bones, but it was nothing like that. When Australians say “the bush,” they mean the woods. The forest. First, though, we had to get out of Melbourne, and drive beyond the seemingly endless suburbs. It was August, the dead of winter, and so we had the windows rolled up. The homes we passed were made of wood, many with high fences around the back yards. They didn’t look exactly like American houses, but I couldn’t quite iden‑ tify the difference. Was it the roofs? I wondered. The siding? Pat was driving, and as we passed the turnoff for a shopping center she invited us to picture a four ‑ burner stove. “Gas or electric?” Hugh asked, and she said that it didn’t matter. This was not a real stove but a symbolic one, used to prove a point at a management seminar she’d once attended. “One burner
represents your family, one is your friends, the third is your health, and the fourth is your work.” The gist, she said, was that in order to be suc‑ cessful you have to cut off one of your burners. And in order to be really successful you have to cut off two. Pat has her own business, a good one that’s allow‑ ing her to retire at fifty ‑ five. She owns three houses, and two cars, but, even without the stuff, she seems like a genuinely happy person. And that alone constitutes success. I asked which two burners she had cut off, and she said that the first to go had been family. After that, she switched off her health. “How about you?” I thought for a moment, and said that I’d cut off my friends. “It’s nothing to be proud of, but after meeting Hugh I quit making an effort.” “And what else?” she asked. “Health, I guess.” Hugh’s answer was work. “And?” “Just work,” he said.
I asked Pat why she’d cut off her family, and with no trace of bitterness she talked about her parents, both severe alcoholics. They drank away their jobs and credit, and because they were broke they moved a lot, most often in the middle of the night. This made it hard to have a pet, though for a short time Pat and her sister managed to own a sheep. It was an old, beat ‑ up ram they named Mr. Preston. “He was lovely and good ‑ natured, until my father sent him off to be shorn,” Pat said. “When he returned, there were bald patches and horrible deep cuts, like stab wounds, in his skin. Then we moved to an apartment, and had to get rid of him.” She looked at her hands on the steering wheel. “Poor old Mr. Preston. I hadn’t thought about him in years.” It was around this time that we finally entered the bush. Hugh pointed out the window, at a lump of dirty fur lying beside a fallen tree, and Pat caroled, “Roadkill!” Then she pulled over, so we could take a closer look. Since leaving Melbourne, we’d been climbing higher into the foothills. The temperature had dropped, and
there were graying patches of snow on the ground. I had on a sweater and a jacket, but they weren’t quite enough, and I shivered as we walked toward the body, and saw that it was a … what, exactly? “A teen ‑ age kangaroo?” “A wallaby,” Pat corrected me. The thing had been struck but not run over. It hadn’t decomposed, or been disfigured, and I was surprised by the shoddiness of its coat. It was as if you’d bred a rabbit with a mule. Then there was the tail, which reminded me of a lance. “Hugh,” I called. “Come here and look at the wallaby.” It’s his belief that in marveling at a dead animal on the roadside you may as well have killed it yourself — not accidentally but on purpose, cack‑ ling, most likely, as you ran it down. Therefore, he stayed in the car. “It’s your loss,” I called, and a great cloud of steam issued from my mouth.
Our destination that afternoon was a place called Daylesford, which looked, when we arrived, more like a movie set than like an actual working town. The buildings on the main street were two stories tall, and made of wood, like buildings in the Old West, but brightly painted. Here was the shop selling handmade soaps shaped like petite fours. Here was the fudgery, the jammery, your source for moisturizer. If Dodge City had been founded and maintained by homosexuals, this is what it might have looked like. “The spas are fantastic,” Pat said, and she parked the car in front of a puppet shop. From there we walked down a slight hill, passing a flock of sulfur ‑ crested cockatoos, just milling about, pulling worms from the front lawn of a bed ‑ and ‑ breakfast. This was the moment when familiarity slipped away, and Australia seemed not just distant but impossibly foreign. “Will you look at that,” I said. It was Pat who had made the lunch reservation. The restaurant was attached to a hotel, and on arriving we were seated beside a picture window. The view was of a wooden deck and, immediately
beyond it, a small lake. On a sunny day, it was probably blinding, but the winter sky was like brushed aluminum. The water beneath it had the same dull sheen, and its surface reflected nothing. Even before the menus were handed out, you could see what sort of a place this was. Order the pork and it might resemble a rough ‑ hewn raft, stranded by tides on a narrow beach of polenta. Fish might come with shredded turnips or a pabulum of coddled fruit. The younger an ingre‑ dient, the more highly it was valued, thus the baby chicken, the baby spinach, the newborn asparagus, each pale stalk as slender as a fang. As always in a fancy restaurant, I asked Hugh to order for me. “Whatever you think,” I told him. “Just so long as there’s no chocolate in it.” He and Pat weighed our options, and I watched the hostess seat a party of eight. Bringing up the rear was a woman in her mid ‑ thirties, pretty, and with a baby on her shoulder. Its back was covered with a shawl, but to judge from the size it looked extremely young — a month old, tops.
Keep it away from the chef, I thought. A short while later, I noticed that the child hadn’t shifted position. Its mother was running her hand over its back, almost as if she were feeling for a switch, and when the top of the shawl fell away I saw that this was not a baby but a baby doll. “Psssst,” I whispered, and when Pat raised her eyes I directed them to the other side of the room. “Is that normal in Australia?” I asked. “Maybe it’s a grieving thing,” she offered. “Maybe she lost a baby in childbirth and this is helping her to work through it.” There’s a definite line between looking and staring, and after I was caught crossing it I turned toward the window. On the highest rail of the deck was a wooden platform, and standing upon it, looking directly into my eyes, was what I knew to be a kookaburra. This thing was as big as a seagull, but squatter, squarer, and all done up in earth tones, the complete spectrum from beige to dark walnut. When seen full on, the feathers
atop his head looked like brush ‑ cut hair, and that gave him a brutish, almost conservative look. If owls were the professors of the avian kingdom, then kookaburras, I thought, might well be the gym teachers. When the waitress arrived, I pointed out the window and asked her a half ‑ dozen questions, all of them fear ‑ based. “Oh,” she said, “that bird’s not going to hurt anybody.” She took our orders and then she must have spoken to one of the waiters. He was a tall fellow, college age, and he approached our table with a covered bowl in his hands. I assumed that it was an appetizer, but it seemed instead that it was for the kookaburra. “Would you like to step outside and feed him?” he asked. I wanted to say that between the wallaby and the baby doll I was already overstimulated, but how often in life do you get such an offer? That’s how I found myself on the deck, holding a bowl of raw duck meat cut into slender strips. At the sight of it, the bird stood up and flew onto my arm, which buckled slightly beneath the weight.
“Don’t be afraid,” the waiter said, and he talked to the kookaburra in a soothing, respectful voice, the way you might to a child with a switchblade in his hand. For that’s what this thing’s beak was — a serious weapon. I held a strip of raw duck, and after yanking it from my fingers the bird flew back to the railing. Then he took the meat and began slamming it against his wooden platform.
Whap, whap, whap. Over and over, as if he were tenderizing it. “This is what he’d do in the wild with snakes and lizards and such,” the waiter said. “He thinks it’s still alive, see. He thinks he’s killing it.” The kookaburra must have slammed the meat against the wooden platform a good ten times. Only then did he swallow it, and look up, expectantly, for more. I took another strip from the bowl, and the action repeated itself.
Whap, whap, whap. On or about his third helping, I got used to the feel of a bird on my arm, and started thinking about other things, starting with the word “kooka‑ burra.” I first heard it in the fifth grade, when our music teacher went on an Australian kick. She taught us to sing “Waltzing Matilda,” “Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport,” and what we called, simply, “Kookaburra.” I’d never heard such craziness in my life. The first song, for instance, included the words “jumbuck,” “billabong,” “swag‑ man,” and “tucker bag,” none of which were ever explained. The more nonsensical the lyric, the harder it was to remember, and that, most likely, is why I retained the song about the kooka‑ burra — it was less abstract than the others. I recall that after school that day I taught it to my sister Amy, who must have been in the first grade at the time. We sang it in the car, we sang it at the table, and then, one night, we sang it in her bed, the two of us lying side by side and rocking back and forth. “Kookaburra sits in the old gum tree …”
We’d been at it for half an hour, when the door flung open. “What the hell is going on?” It was our father, one hand resting, teapot style, on his hip, and the other — what would be the spout — formed into a fist. He was dressed in his standard around ‑ the ‑ house outfit, which is to say, his underpants. No matter the season, he wore them without a shirt or socks, the way a toddler might pad about in a diaper. For as long as any of us could remember, this was the way it went: he returned home from work and stepped out of his slacks, sighing with relief, as if they were oppres‑ sive, like high heels. All said, my father looked good in his underpants, better than the guys in the Penney’s catalogue, who were, in my opinion, consistently weak in the leg department. Silhou‑ etted in the doorway, he resembled a wrestler.
Maybe not one in tip ‑ top condition, but he was closer than any of the other dads on our street. “It’s one o’clock in the morning, for God’s sake. David, get to your room.” Lou Sedaris claiming it was 1 a.m. meant that it was, at best, ten ‑ thirty. Still, though, there was to my room and he resumed his position in front of the t.v. Within a f ew minutes he was snoring, and I crept back upstairs to join Amy for another twenty rounds. “Kookaburra sits in the old gum tree, merry merry king of the bush is he — ” It didn’t take long for our father to rally. “Did I not tell you to go to your room?” What would strike me afterward was the inno‑ cence of it. If I had children and they stayed up late, singing a song about a bird, I believe I would find it charming. “I knew I had those two for a reason,” I think I’d say to myself. I might go so far as to secretly record them, and submit the tape in a My Kids Are Cuter Than Yours competition. My dad, by contrast, clearly didn’t see it that way, which was strange to me. It’s not like we were
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ruining his t.v. reception. He coul dn’t even hear us from that distance, so what did he have to complain about? “All right, sonny, I’m giving you ten seconds. One. Two …” I guess what he resented was being dismissed. Had our mother told us to shut up, we’d probably have done it. He, on the other hand, sitting around in his underpants — it just didn’t seem that important. At the count of six, I pushed back the covers. “I’m going,” I spat, and once again I followed my father downstairs. Ten minutes later, I was back. Amy cleared a space for me, and we picked up where we had left off. “Laugh, Kookaburra! Laugh, Kookaburra! Gay your life must be.” Actually, maybe it was that last bit that bothered him. An eleven ‑ year ‑ old boy in bed with his sister, not just singing about a bird but doing it as best he could, rocking back and forth and
imagining himself onstage, possibly wearing a cape, and performing before a multitude. The third time he came into the room, our father was a wild man. Even worse, he was wielding a prop, the dreaded fraternity paddle. It looked like a beaver’s tail made out of wood. In my memory, there were Greek letters burned into one side, and crowded around them were the signatures of other Beta Epsilons, men we’d never met, with old ‑ fashioned nicknames like Lefty and Sliv‑ ers — names, to me, as synonymous with misfor‑ tune as Smith and Wesson. Our father didn’t bring out the paddle very often, but when he did he always used it. “All right, you, let’s get this over with.” Amy knew that she had nothing to worry about. He was after me, the instigator, and so she propped herself against the pillows, drawing up her legs as I scooted to the other side of the bed, then stood there, dancing from foot to foot. It was the worst possi‑ ble strategy, as evasion only made him angrier. Still, who in his right mind would surrender to such a punishment?
He got me eventually, the first blows landing just beneath my kneecaps. Then down I went, and he moved in on my upper thigh. Whap, whap, whap. And while it certainly hurt, I have to say that he didn’t go overboard. He never did. I asked him about it once, when I was around fourteen, and he chalked it up to a combination of common sense and remarkable self ‑ control. “I know that if I don’t stop myself early I’ll kill you,” he said. As always after a paddling, I returned to my room vowing never to talk to my father again. To hell with him, to hell with my mother, who’d done nothing to stop him, to hell with Amy for not taking a few licks herself, and to hell with the others, who were, by now, certainly whispering about it. I didn’t have the analogy of the stovetop back then, but what I’d done was turn off the burner marked “family.” Then I’d locked my door and sat there simmering, knowing even then that without them I was nothing. Not a son or a brother but just a boy — and how could that ever be enough? As a full ‑ grown man, it seems no different. Cut off
your family, and how would you know who you are? Cut them off in order to gain success, and how could that success be measured? What would it possibly mean? I thought of this as the kookaburra, finally full, swallowed his last strip of duck meat, and took off over the lake. Inside the restaurant, our first courses had arrived, and I watched through the window as Hugh and Pat considered their plates. I should have gone inside right then, but I needed another minute to take it all in, and acknowl‑ edge, if only to myself, that I really did have it made. A storybook town on the far side of the world, enough in my pocket to shout a fancy lunch, and the sound of that bird in the distant trees, laughing. Laughing.
Understanding Understanding Owls
a day in every man’s life when he looks around and says to himself, “I’ve got to weed out some of these owls?” I can’t be alone in this, can I? And, of course, you don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings. Therefore you keep the crocheted owl given to you by your second-young‑ est sister and accidentally on purpose drop the mug that reads “Owl Love You Always” and was sent by someone who clearly never knew you to begin with. I mean, mugs with words on them! does there come
Owl cocktail napkins stay, because everyone needs napkins. Ditto the owl candle. Owl trivet: take to the charity shop along with the spool-size Japanese owl that blinks his eyes and softly hoots when you plug him into your computer. Just when you think you’re making progress, you remember the owl tobacco tin, and the owl tea cozy. Then there are the plates, the coasters, the Christmas ornaments. This is what happens when you tell people you like something. For my sister Amy, that thing was rabbits. When she was in her late thirties, she got one as a pet, and before it had chewed through its first phone cord she’d been given rabbit slippers, rabbit cushions, bowls, refrigerator magnets, you name it. “Really,” she kept insisting, “the live one is enough.” But nothing could stem the tide of crap. Amy’s invasion started with a live rabbit, while Hugh’s and mine began, in the late nineteen nineties, with decorative art. We were living in New York then, and he had his own painting business. One of his clients had bought a new apartment, and on the high, domed ceiling of her
entryway she wanted a sky full of birds. Hugh began with warblers and meadowlarks. He sketched some cardinals and blue tits for color and was just wondering if it wasn’t too busy when she asked if he could add some owls. It made no sense nature-wise — owls and songbirds work different shifts, and even if they didn’t they would still never be friends. No matter, though. This was her ceiling, and if she wanted turkey vultures — or, as was later decided, bats — that’s what she would get. All Hugh needed was a reference, so he went to the Museum of Natural History and returned with “Understanding Owls.” The book came into our lives almost fifteen years ago and I’ve yet to go more than a month without mentioning it. “You know,” I’ll say, “there’s some‑ thing about nocturnal birds of prey that I just don’t get. If only there was somewhere I could turn for answers.” “I wish I could help you,” Hugh will say, adding, a second or two later,
“Hold on a minute … what about … ‘Understanding Owls’?”
We’ve performed this little routine more times than I can count, but back then, when the book was still fresh-smelling and its pages had not yet yellowed, I decided that because Hugh actually did get a kick out of owls, I would try to find him a stuffed one. My search turned up plenty of ravens. I found pheasants and ducks, and foottall baby ostriches. I found a freeze-dried turkey’s head attached to its own foot, but owls, no luck. That’s when I learned that it’s illegal to own them in the United States. Even if one dies naturally, of a stroke or old age. If it chokes on a mouse or gets kicked by a horse. Should one fly against your house, break its neck, and land like magic on your front stoop, you’re still not allowed to stuff it or even to store its body in your freezer. Technically, you’re not even allowed to keep one of its feathers — that’s how protected they are. I learned this at a now defunct taxidermy shop in midtown Manhattan. “But, if you’re really interested,” the clerk I spoke to said, “I’ve got a little something you might want to see.” He stepped into the back room and returned with what I could only identify as a creature. “What
we’ve done,” he boasted, “is stretch a chicken over an owl form.” “That’s really … something,” I said, groping for a compliment. The truth was that even a child would have seen this for what it was. The beak made from what looked to be a bear claw, the feet with their worn-down, pedestrian talons: I mean, please! This was what a chicken might wear to a Halloween party if she had ten minutes to throw a costume together. “Let me think about it,”I said. Years later, we moved to Paris, where, within my first week, I found an albino peacock. I found swans and storks and all manner of seabirds, but, again, no owls, because stuffing them is forbidden in France. In the u.k., though, it’s a slightly differ‑ ent story. You can’t go out and shoot one, certainly. They’re protected in life just as they are in the u. s., but afterward, in death, things loosen up a bit. Most of the owls I saw in Great Britain had been stuffed during the Victorian era. I’d see them at English flea markets and in Scottish antique shops but, as is always the case, the moment you decide to buy one they’re nowhere to be had. I needed
one — or decided I did — in February of 2008. Hugh and I were moving from our apartment to a house in Kensington, and, after going through our owl objects and deciding we could do without ninetenths of them, I thought I’d get him the real thing for Valentine’s Day. I should have started looking a month or two in advance, but with Christmas and packing and helping to ready our new place, it had slipped my mind. Thus I wound up on February 13th calling a London taxidermy shop and asking if they had any owls. The person who answered the phone told me he had two of them, both recent specimens, and freestanding, not behind glass as most of the old ones are. The store was open only by appointment, and after arranging to come by the following afternoon, I went to where Hugh was packing books in the next room and said, “I am giving you the best Valentine’s Day gift ever.” This is one of those things I do and immediately hate myself for. How is the other person supposed to respond? What’s the point? For the first eighteen years we were together, I’d give Hugh
chocolates for Valentine’s Day, and he’d give me a carton of cigarettes. Both of us got exactly what we wanted, and it couldn’t have been easier. Then I quit smoking and decided that in place of cigarettes I needed, say, an eighteenth-century scientific model of the human throat. It was life-size, about four inches long, and, because it was old, handmade, and designed to be taken apart for study, it cost quite a bit of money. “When did Valentine’s Day turn into this?” Hugh asked when I told him that he had to buy it for me.What could I say? Like everything else, holiday gifts escalate. The presents get better and better until one year you decide you don’t need anything else, and start making donations to animal shelters. Even if you hate dogs and cats, they’re somehow always the ones who benefit. “Eventually, we’ll celebrate by spaying a few dozen kittens,” I said, “but until that day comes, I want that throat.” On Valentine’s Day, I carried a few boxes from our apartment to the house we’d bought. It looked like the sort of place where Scrooge might have lived — a narrow brick building, miserly in terms
of space, and joined to identical, equally grim houses on either side of it. From there, I walked around the corner and got on the Underground. The taxidermy shop was on a quiet street in North London, and as I approached I saw a man and his two sons with their faces pressed against the barred front windows. “A polar bear!” One of the boys shouted. The other tugged on his father’s coat. “And a penguin! Look at the baby penguin!”
My heart raced. The man who owned the shop was so much taller than me that in order to look him in the eye I had to throw my head all the way back, the way I do at the dentist’s office. He had enviably thick hair, and as he opened the door to let me in I noticed a stuffed orange kitten positioned on the floor beside a Dalmatian puppy. Casting a shadow upon them was a rabbit standing upright on its hind legs, and above him, on a shelf, sat two tawny owls, each mounted to a stump and standing around twenty inches high. Both were females, and in great shape, but what I’d really wanted was
a barn owl. Those are the ones with spooky white faces, like satellite dishes with eyes. “We do get those from time to time, but they’re rare,” the taxidermist said. Above his head hung a massive seagull with its beak open, and next to him, on a tabletop, lounged a pair of hedgehogs. I’ve seen better variety, but there was no denying that the man did beautiful work. Nothing had crooked eyes or bits of exposed plaster at the corners of its mouth. If seen in a photo, you’d think that these animals were alive, and had gathered peacefully to boast about their excellent health. The taxidermist and I discussed the owls, and when my eyes cut to a glass-doored cabinet with several weather-beaten skulls inside it, he asked if I was a doctor. “Me?” For some reason I looked at my hands. “Oh, goodness no.” “Then your interest in those skulls is nonpro‑ fessional?” “Exactly.”
The taxidermist’s eyes brightened, and he led me to a human skeleton half-hidden in the back of the room. “Who do you think this was?” he asked. Being a layman, all I had to go by was the height — between four and a half and five feet tall. “Is it an adolescent?” The taxidermist invited me to guess again, but before I could he blurted, “It’s a Pygmy!” He then told me that in the nineteenth century the English went to what is now the Congo and hunted these people, tracked them down and shot them for sport. Funny how quickly this changed the mood. “But he could have died of a heart attack, right?” I said. “I mean, how are we to know for certain that he was murdered?” “Oh, we know, all right,” the taxidermist told me. It would have been disturbing to see the skeleton of a slain Pygmy in a museum, but finding him in a shop, for sale, raised certain questions, uncomfortable ones, like: How much is he?
“If you like the odd bits and pieces, I think I’ve got something else you might enjoy.” The taxider‑ mist retreated to the area behind his desk, and pulled a plastic bag off an overhead shelf. It was, I noticed, from Waitrose, a grocery store described to me upon my move to England as “a cut above.” From the bag he removed what looked like a platter with an oblong glass dome over it. Inside was a man’s forearm, complete with little hairs and a smudged tattoo. The taxidermist said, completely unnecessarily, “Now, there’s a story behind this.” For what human limb in a Waitrose bag is not without some sort of story? He placed the platter on the table, and as the lid was lifted and set to the side I was told that, a hundred years ago, the taxidermist’s grandfather witnessed a bar fight between two sailors. One was armed with a sabre, and the other, appar‑ ently, was disarmed with one. After it happened, the crowd went wild. The amputee fell on his back, and as he lay there in shock, bleeding to death, the taxidermist’s grandfather looked down at the floor, at the blood-soaked fingers which
may have still been twitching, and likely thought, Well, it’s not like it’s doing him any good. The story sounds a bit far-fetched, but there was no denying that the arm was real. The cut had been made two inches south of the elbow, and the exposed end, with its cleanly severed radius and ulna, reminded me of osso bucco. “It was my grandfather who mummified it,” the taxider‑ mist said. “You can see it’s not the best job in the world, but it’s really rather good for a first attempt.”
I leaned closer. “Touch it,” the taxidermist whispered. As if I were under a spell, I did, shuddering a little at the feel of the hairs. Equally creepy was the arm’s color, which was not Caucasian flesh tone but not brown, either, the way most desic‑ cated body parts are. This was the same slightly toasted shade as a spray-on tan. “I think I’ll just take one of those owls,” I said. “The one on the left, if that’s o.k.”
The taxidermist nodded. Then he reached to an even higher shelf and brought down another plastic grocery bag, this one from Tesco, which is decidedly less upscale. “Now, a smell is going to hit you when I open this up, but don’t worry,” he said. “It’s just the smoke they used to preserve the head.” That’s a phrase you don’t hear too often, so it took a moment for it to sink in. When he opened the bag, I saw that he might more accurately have said “the head of this teen-age girl,” for she’d been no older than fourteen at the time of her death. This sounds super grisly but is, I propose, just
medium grisly. The head was four hundred years old, and came from somewhere in South America — Peru, I think he said. The skin was dry and thin, like leather on an old worn-out purse. Parts of it were eaten away, exposing the skull beneath it, but what really struck me was her hair, which was sleek and black, divvied into delicate, slender braids. I didn’t ask the price, but said, a little more emphatically, “I really think the owl will do it for me today. It’s a Valentine’s Day present — perfect for our new place. A house, actually — no base‑ ment, and three stories tall.” I wasn’t trying to be boastful. I just wanted him to know that I was loved, and that I lived aboveground. A few minutes later, the owl secured in a goodsized cardboard box, I headed back to the Underground. Ordinarily I’d be elated — I’d been determined to find Hugh the perfect present, and, by golly, I had done it — but instead I felt unhinged, not by the things I had seen so much as by the taxidermist. It’s common to be misread by people who don’t know you. “Like to try Belligerent, the
new fragrance for men?” I’ll be asked in a depart‑ ment store. And I always think, Really? Do I seem like the kind of guy who would wear cologne? Hotel operators so often address me as “Mrs. Sedaris” that I no longer bother to correct them. I’ve been mistaken for a parent, a pickpocket, and even, God forbid, an s.u.v. owner, and I’ve al ways been able to brush it off. What’s rare is not to be misread. The taxidermist knew me for less time than it took to wipe my feet on his mat, and, with no effort whatsoever, he looked into my soul and recognized me for the person I really am: the type who’d actually love a Pygmy, and could easily get over the fact that he’d been murdered for sport, thinking, breezily, Well, it was a long time ago. Worse still, I would flaunt it, hoping, in the way a Porsche owner does, that this would become a part of my identity. “They say he has a Pygmy,” I could imagine my new neighbors whispering as I walked down the street. “Hangs him plain as day in the corner of his living room, next to the musket he was shot with.”
I’d love to be talked about in this way, but how did the taxidermist know? Plenty of people must go into his store, ask for a kitten or a seagull or whatever and walk out five minutes later know‑ ing nothing about the human parts. Why show me the head in the grocery bag? As for the arm, how had he known I’d been dying to touch it? I hadn’t said anything one way or the other, so what was the giveaway? At the station, I went through the turnstile and stood on the platform until a train arrived. The owl wasn’t heavy — in fact, it was surprisingly light — but the box was cumbersome, so I was happy to find a seat. At our first stop, a teen-age girl in a school uniform got on and took the spot across from me. Deal with a kid her age today and the thought of her head winding up behind some shop counter in a plastic bag might not be all that troubling. I mean, the mouths on some of them! That said, it shouldn’t be just any kid that age. The one the taxidermist showed me, for instance, what was her story? Fourteen-year-olds existed four hundred years ago, but teen-agers,
with their angst and rebelliousness, their rage and Ritalin and very own version of Vogue magazine, are a fairly recent construct. In the seventeenth-century jungles of Peru, a kid that age would have babies already. Half her life would probably be over, and that’s if she was lucky. To have your chopped-off head preserved and then wind up in a Tesco bag some six thousand miles away — that was the indignity. Tesco! At least the arm was in a Waitrose bag. It bothered me that the bag bothered me more than the head did, but what are you going to do? A person doesn’t consciously choose what he focuses on. Those things choose you, and, once they do, nothing, it seems, can shake them. Find someone with a similar eye and Christmas shop‑ ping is a breeze. I can always spot something for my sisters Gretchen and Amy. The three of us can walk into a crowded party and all zoom in on the person who’s missing a finger, or who has one regular sized ear and one significantly smaller one, while my sister Lisa will pick up something else entirely.
Hugh and I don’t notice the same things, either. That’s how he can be with me. Everything the taxidermist saw is invisible to him: my superfici‑ ality, my juvenile fascination with the abnormal, my willingness to accept and sometimes even celebrate evil — point this out and he’ll say, “David? My David? Oh, no. He’s not like that at all.” A person who’s that out of it deserves both an owl and chocolate, so I got off the train at Piccadilly Circus and picked him up a box. Then I caught a bus and hurried toward home, thinking about love, and death, and about that throat, so elegant in its detail, which was, no doubt, awaiting me.
This book was created and illustrated by Tiffany Hill under the supervision of Jennifer McKnight as an assignment in Advanced Problems i during the fall semester of 2013 at the University of Missouri – St. Louis. Pages were composed InDesign CS6 using image files prepared in Photoshop. Century Schoolbook was used for the copy, set at 10/14. It is Laser printed on Butcher White Dur-O-Tone paper, 80lb text, produced by the French Paper Company. Printed by Tiffany Hill Book
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